Anh Do - The Happiest Refugee

The Happiest Refugee is one of those unique unputdownable stories which forces its way to the top of your already long list of priorities and engulfs your time and imagination until you have reached its conclusion. In the midst of one very busy week, I found myself relegating many of my other more important, yet far less interesting, tasks to the side and losing myself in the beautiful tale of Australian comedian Anh Do’s life.

Do’s story is that of thousands of migrant Australian families, including my own. Trapped in a life of poverty and hopelessness, under a merciless Communist regime, young Mama and Papa Do had no choice but to risk their lives and that of their extended family’s, to escape to a better country. So 40 men, women and children snuck out onto the open sea before dawn, into a dingy nine-metre long boat, to make the harrowing journey away from Vietnam. They eventually make it to Australia where they are confronted (yes, confronted, as it’s all too much to take in) by a world of hope, opportunity, generosity and small pleasures that they never imagined. Most amusing is the lucky discovery of St. Vinnies, where you can get a bag full of clothes for almost nothing, even jeans for your toddler. “What a great country!” is a phrase often repeated throughout the narrative, as the family revel in their new life.

Of course, life for a migrant family in Australia is anything but easy, particularly when education and English are key requirements of many good jobs. So, like many of our own migrant parents, Anh’s were forced to take whatever money-making opportunities they could find in order to create a better future for their children. But while such tales of hardship, displacement and loneliness could be told with self-pity and exasperation, Anh recounts his family’s day-to-day struggles with humorous anecdotes that reveal lessons learned the tough way, and how most things invariably work out. Interwoven with these stories are heart-warming and humbling tales about the tiny pleasures we take for granted, what Anh calls “little windfalls of luck”. Like when, as a teenager, Anh discovers a voucher in the mail for 50-cent Big Macs at Yagoona McDonald’s, with a limit of four per voucher. Having not had Maccas for years, due to his family’s financial situation, the Dos had hit the jackpot and went around to the neighbours to gather more vouchers. Armed with six, the family drove to McDonald’s, purchased the 24 Big Macs and Anh and his two younger siblings shared a banquet which they still reminisce about today. Or even more touching is the time when Anh found a green chip in his packet of crisps, sent it back for a refund on the off chance that he might redeem his couple of bucks, and got sent a humungous box of chips as compensation. For the next week, he had the same chips as everybody else at school, and as he recounts, “For a week I was normal.”

However, there are some stories that are too painful, too humiliating in their desperation for even a comedian to sugar coat. Like the time his mother was sick in bed, but insisted on getting up to finish sewing the garments for delivery the next day. As he helped his mother to her sewing table, Anh describes the horrible shame of “secretly hoping she would go on, keep sewing, even at the risk of her becoming seriously ill. The fear of having no money was so merciless and so overwhelming.”

Overall, and as we know, this tale has a happy ending. Anh goes on to achieve the dream of many migrant parents – for their child to be offered a high-paying job, in this case it is as a lawyer for a top firm – only to turn his back on it to pursue a career as a comedian. The idea of a Vietnamese migrant comedian is so funny that it can only be true. And Anh does achieve the fame and fortune he needs to give his mother family a better life.

Do’s storytelling is simple but captivating – like talking to a mate over beers. His story isn’t remarkable in any kind of splendid way; it is the story of so many young Australians from a migrant family who witness the cultural, social and financial struggles of their parents and commit to forging a different future for themselves. But it is in this ordinariness that Do captures the collective experience of an entire generation of people. The ordinariness is only made incredible (to Do and his siblings at the time, and to us now) through the stark juxtaposition between Anh and his North Sydney private school peers. His is a relatable tale that, as the daughter of migrants who came to this country when I was five, took me back to the ‘poor stories’ (as one of my Eastern suburbs friends calls them) of my own childhood, but cast them in the humour, warmth and simplicity in which they occurred. We didn’t have much, but at least we had fun and were creative with what we had. I think that’s the experience of most migrant children, and Do captures that naivety and innocence, while being honest about the hardships his family endured. It truly is a great read, and a part of Australian social history that is rarely acknowledged in literature or art, but completely indelible in the character of our country. [Image from http://www.thereadingroom.com/]